There’s Some 10,000 Anime Episodes For Wii U Streaming In Japan

Love Gundam or any of the other series that Bandai have put out in the past? Have a Japanese Wii U? Then you might be interested to know that in Japan, there’s actually a Wii U Bandai Channel. If you download and add the channel to your list, free viewers get to check out around 500 different anime series’ first episodes for free an unlimited number of times.

If you do cough up some cash for a monthly Bandai Namco ID, though, you’ll gain access to almost the entire backlog of some 580 different shows such as Sgt Frog, the Gundam series, and more. The monthly cost is just 1050 yen (about $11) and that will give you over 10,000 episodes to watch. Note that to get your ID and sign up for the monthly account you’ll need to use a PC or smart phone.

Since the channel’s on the Wii U, this means you can watch it on the big screen TV while using the WIi U’s gigantic controller touchscreen to scroll through other shows or view other pertinent information. With such a vast array of shows in the library, you’ll also be able to scroll through them using their main poster shot or via searching, including using keywords.

I have a Japanese 3DS so it would be cool if they also make it avaliable for 3DS.

Charok

Oh my gosh yes, Sgt. Frog! This is the only site I come to where I ever see it mentioned (and even then only a few times). I’d give almost anything to be able to see the 250 or so episodes I cannot find. :(
Anyway, this a pretty cool service.

*back to lurking*

AkuLord3

Ahhh good times, time to rewatch the first opening…OH YEA

Shota

kero kero !

Setsu Oh

GARA GARA!

Shota

KUKUKUKUKUKUKU!

NeoPancho

Well… i have a Japanese Wii U and i can’t use the service; just like with Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter G, you also need a Japanese IP to be able to play those 2 games or watch some anime series with the Bandai Channel.

AokiShizuku

IP blocks. Another bane of my existence.

NeoPancho

Yeah… i guess it’s possible to use a VPN service to avoid this, but i’m not sure it’s fast enough to stream videos or play online games…

AokiShizuku

Yeah you can but if you’re going to go through that much trouble, you might as well use your computer to view the raw episodes. Heck you could even hook up your laptop to a large TV as well. I’d import a Wii U but these IP blocks are making it hard. Geez Nintendo. (I’ll flip if they IP block the eShop soon)

Christopher McNair

They already did it to the 3DS eShop when they added Miiverse.

NeoPancho

I know what you mean, but it’s a slightly different problem (and a bigger in my opinion), before (or now if you don’t create a Nintendo ID) you could choose from a small selection of different eshops (it’s not like if you could choose Japan or an America state with an Spanish 3DS) by just changing the region of your 3DS… now you have to settle for one eShop and you can’t change it later…but it’s my understanding that there isn’t an IP block in place, you could live in Mexico and use the Canada eShop, the problem is you couldn’t go back to Mexico, with an IP block you couldn’t access the Canada eShop from Mexico without a few magic tricks. I can be perfectly wrong at this point and actually be in place an IP block in some areas, what i can say is that the Japanese eShop and Miiverse fro 3DS works without any problem from outside of Japan (even the manga store and music store works perfectly!)

CirnoLakes

This interests me.

I hope it’s not too much trouble, living outside of Japan, to sign up.

NeoPancho

Well, you can download the aplication from the eShop without problem (if you have a Japanese system), but once you open it, it checks your IP and if it’s from outside of Japan it won’t allow you to watch anything…

CirnoLakes

That’s a really big shame!

I’m tired of things like this being IP restricted. Punishing us for not living in Japan.

British_Otaku

I hope they get some equivalent of this for the Japanese 3DS, though I guess it will be geolocked like Hulu and other similar services…

Spirit Macardi

Keroro on Wii U?! WANT!

Now if we could just get Namco Bandai to bring a certain other Kumiko Watanabe voiced character to the console.

Quizler

Makes me sad that we don’t have Crunchyroll streaming on the WiiU, the gamepad would be perfect for it.

Pdugna

Same thing as the Crunchyroll App for vita it’s basically there isn’t enough owners of the system to warrant even bothering to them it seems….Oh how I would love anime in OLED >.<

Micrll

They did announce a Vita app back in August but have not said anything since.

Just checked, it says the flash player needs to be updated. There goes that idea…

Thom

Honestly I cried a bit each time I bought one of the Gundam Unicorn blu rays at full price. Worth it in the end though. Streaming things in Japan for me is difficult since I don’t use hardware encoded for the area.

Christopher McNair

Why would the Japanese of all people need to buy a Wii U to watch anime? That’s what every other device they already have is for. I don’t think having this service is going to make many people go buy Wii U’s when they have phones and 3DS’ and other portable devices to watch anime anywhere they want.

Asuna Ilano

That’s pretty awesome for WiiU. Now I hope they do the same thing outside Japan.

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